Fighting Pretty

This debut features a 29-year-old amateur Welsh woman boxer who recovers from divorcing her silent archaeologist husband by returning to her childhood home in the Valleys and getting back in the ring. Walsh tells Lizzie's story with a disarming lack of guile and her novel feels all the more real because of it. Thirty-year-old men are obsessed with military memorabilia to the point that it becomes more important than saving their marriage; a regular at the local gym, a favoured sparring partner, is effortlessly chipper, complimentary and grateful for being punched to humiliation by girls, in a way that adds nothing to the story but nevertheless entertains. A bitter old father watches UKTV Gold and reads the local paper twice over rather than ask his daughter how her day has been. Lizzie's return to some sort of happiness via mild success in the ring contains too few moments of euphoria. If this novel is unexceptional, it is charming in its depictions of life in the gym, of the daily office grind and serves as a refreshing insight into provincial Britain today.